Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

TOWARDS AN INDUSTRIAL WORLD—the reed-beds of small scale or dependent production which formedround the industrial and commercial centres. Domestic and otherindustries founded earlier as appendages of feudalism, also existed.Most of these—e.g. the Silesian linen-industry—were in rapid andtragic decline. 16 The great cities were hardly industrialized at all,though they maintained a vast population of labourers and craftsmento serve the needs of consumption, transport and general services. Ofthe world's towns with over 100,000 inhabitants, apart from Lyon,only the British and American ones included obviously industrialcentres: Milan, for instance, in 1841 had a mere two small steamengines. In fact the typical industrial centre—in Britain as well as onthe continent—was a small or medium-sized provincial town or acomplex of villages.In one important respect, however, continental—and also to someextent American—industrialization, differed from the British. The preconditionsfor its spontaneous development by private enterprise werefar less favourable. As we have seen, in Britain there was, after some200 years of slow preparation, no real shortage of any of the factors ofproduction and no really crippling institutional obstacle to full capitalistdevelopment. Elsewhere this was not so. In Germany, for instance, therewas a distinct capital shortage; the very modesty of the standard of lifeamong the German middle classes (beautifully transformed though itwas into the charming austerities of Biedermayer interior decoration)demonstrates it. It is often forgotten that by contemporary Germanystandards Goethe, whose house in Weimar corresponds to rather more—but not much more—than the standard of comfort of the modestbankers of the British Clapham sect, was a very wealthy man indeed.In the 1820s Court ladies and even princesses in Berlin wore simplepercale dresses throughout the year; if they owned a silk dress, they savedit for special occasions. 17 The traditional gild system of master, journeymanand apprentice, still stood in the way of business enterprise, of themobility of skilled labour, and indeed of all economic change: theobligation for a craftsman to belong to a gild was abolished in Prussiain 1811, though not the gilds themselves, whose members were, moreover,politically strengthened by the municipal legislation of the period.Guild production remained almost intact until the 1830s and 40s. Elsewherethe full introduction of Gewerbefreiheit had to wait until the 1850s.A multiplicity of petty states, each with their controls and vestedinterests, still inhibited rational development. Merely to construct ageneral customs union (excluding Austria), as Prussia succeeded indoing in its own interest and by the pressure of its strategic position between1818 and 1834, was a triumph. Each government, mercantilist175